- We suppose it’s better if someone’s disposing of the drugs instead of snorting them.
Ah, Nantucket! This beautiful island community off Cape Cod is a big tourist location for many good reasons, like its beautiful beaches, historical sights, and cocaine-filled sewers.
Wait, what?
Indeed, it seems Nantucket has a cocaine problem. Only, the problem isn’t that people are using it.
Official tests have shown that the wastewater running through the island’s sewers consistently has high concentrations of cocaine. However, according to the same tests, the sewer coke doesn’t have any signs that it ended up in the wastewater after someone consumed it.
What’s more, Nantucket’s police say that they aren’t really seeing a lot of cocaine during arrests and drug busts. It’s a mystery of where the drugs are coming from and how they’re ending up in the wastewater.
One possibility is that someone is simply washing cocaine down the drain somewhere on the island. Another is that Nantucket’s cokeheads are snorting their blow while drinking alcohol.
Whichever the case, there must be a heck of a party going on somewhere in Nantucket.
Three Times National Average
Overall, Nantucket doesn’t have much of a drug problem, at least if you look at the sewage flowing out of the town and island. The local authorities monitor Nantucket’s wastewater for drug remnants, which is a common method to gauge illegal substance use in a given area.
In general, Nantucket residents are shockingly clean. The prevalence of the most common drugs in the island’s wastewater, including fentanyl, meth, and even nicotine, is well below the national and wider regional average.
And then there’s cocaine. For some reason, there’s a lot of cocaine flushing through Nantucket.
The national average for trace cocaine in wastewater hovers around 1,000 nanograms per liter, as there is always a fan of white powder somewhere. In Nantucket, however, the average sits somewhere around 1,500ng/l.
However, the cocaine concentration experiences bizarre, more or less regular spikes. For instance, in both October and December 2025, the cocaine levels jumped to nearly 3,000ng/l — more than three times as much as elsewhere in the country.
No Users in Sight
That’s a lot of coke. Yet, it doesn’t appear that anyone has used the cocaine in the sewers.
When you snort some dope, your body metabolizes cocaine into a chemical called benzoylecgonine (BZE). This is the stuff they look for when you do a urine drug test.
If there’s BZE in your pee, you’ve taken cocaine. Simple, right?
As such, considering all the cocaine in Nantucket’s sewers, you’d probably expect to see high levels of BZE as well. But that’s not the case at all.
Nantucket’s BZE levels sit at roughly the national average, with the add spike here and there. As such, the pattern doesn’t indicate that the cocaine was necessarily snorted by drug users.
Additionally, the cops on Nantucket don’t find large amounts of cocaine when they arrest drug users or traffickers. Sure, during a recent crackdown, they confiscated a lot of the stuff, but it was just one drug out of many other illegal substances the cops seized.
“We’re not having a lot of people come into the booking room, and when we search them, finding cocaine in their pockets, or we’re not pulling over a lot of people and finding cocaine in the car,” Nantucket Police Chief Jody Kasper told Nantucket Current.
“We’re not responding to a lot of incidents around cocaine distribution or seeing cocaine present,” she added.
Where’s It Coming From?
This leaves us with something of a mystery. There’s plenty of cocaine in Nantucket’s sewage, but where is it coming from?
Neither the police nor other authorities are sure. However, they have theories.
One option is that someone somewhere on the island is pouring pure cocaine down the drain. That’s certainly a possibility, as flushing drugs down the toilet is a common way for traffickers to get rid of hidden caches when the cops come a-knocking.
However, the constantly elevated levels of cocaine in the wastewater would indicate that somebody is flushing a steady stream of blow into the pipes. Maybe it’s just us, but that simply doesn’t seem like something a drug trafficker would do.
So, we’re left with another, perhaps more likely possibility. Nantucket’s cocaine users might be enjoying their drugs as a rum and coke, so to say.
“Another [possibility] is when cocaine is consumed with alcohol, it changes the metabolite that’s developed,” said Nantucket’s health director Roque Miramontes.
After drinking alcohol, the body processes cocaine differently. Consequently, it doesn’t produce as much BZE, which could explain the chemical’s low levels in the sewage.
Even then, that’s a ridiculous amount of cocaine for Nantucket residents to consume. But maybe there’s a constant boozy party with lines on the table somewhere on the island.